Abstract

Applying a Base Station (BS) sleep approach during low traffic periods has recently been advocated as a strategy for reducing energy consumption in cellular networks. The complete switching off of certain BS however, can lead to coverage holes and severe performance degradation in terms of off-cell user throughput, greater transmit power dissipation in both the up and downlinks, and more complex interference management. This paper presents a novel cellular network energy saving model in which certain BS rather being turned off are switched to Relay Station (RS) mode during low traffic periods. The switched RS and other shared RS deployed at the cross border of each cell are responsible for upholding the same quality of service (QoS) provision as when all BS are active. A centralised adaptive switching threshold algorithm is also introduced to undertake the switching decision, instead of using a fixed threshold. Simulation results confirm the new BS-RS Switching model using an adaptive threshold can reduce network energy consumption by more than half, as well as improving off-cell users’ throughput.